On Gratitude

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

 

Gratitude is a strange and fleeting feeling. It hit me good today; enough to sit me down and scribble out this memoirish, rambly blog post that'll never quite do the emotion true justice.

That alone tells me that there’s value in taking some time to reflect upon it. To journal in a public manner. To open my ribs and see what's holding me together.

As I write, New Found Glory’s (Spotify) radio station is on my speaker and I’m 2 beers into a greater state of confidence. So why not share my wealth? I feel ecstatic and entirely exhausted. Fueled, yet fatigued at the same time. And also wildly grateful for the breaths between each word.

I don’t know where I’d be or what I'd be doing right now if I hadn’t experienced this first-hand today.

12 hours ago I was groggily waking up over coffee when I got a text from my friends, Steve & Lisa, who needed some help packing up their Uhaul. They’re moving to Princeton next weekend.

Begrudgingly, I skipped over my normal Saturday morning To-Be-Read pile and hustled over to help out. We moved boxes, tables, and bed frames. Mirrors, couches, and lawn decor. Carry stuff in, play some Tetris, repeat. Helping someone move is a pain in the ass, but it is a rewarding feeling once you learn to look back on it.

They ordered pizza for lunch and next thing I knew I was home again. It was suddenly nearing the dinnertime sunset of a Jersey shore town in May.

I felt wrecked. Exhausted. Displaced and disheveled from an unexpected call-to-action. So I made some afternoon coffee while the birds sang the sun to sleep. The plans to accomplish my own chores were sabotaged and I felt no guilt in saving them for tomorrow. “But you can read now!” I told myself, while the sun crept along the treelines of the western horizon.

I picked up a few zines that’ve been staring at me from the pile:

• Al Burian’s 500,000 Airports
• Craig Atkinson’s Coffee & People (#5)
• Steve Zmijewski's Cored: Commuting Love, Sored
• Melissa Taylor’s A Skeleton Of What Used To Be

to name a few. I zipped through them with a focus only caffeine has ever known. They centered me again. These little blips of human condition. 

Coffee was finished and eventually turned into beer. I hopped from the zines to a couple of chapters in Dune (which, by the way, I’m trying to reread before the new movie comes out). Then I sat up and it was dark out. Just like that. 

The sunset painted the sky purple and black above the ocean and I felt… grateful. 

At least, this was the moment I first noticed my awareness of it. I don’t know why I hadn’t recognized it before then. But I knew it was the one thing holding me together.

So I decided to write about it, as I always do. It scratched the part of my brain that words aloud are unable to properly express. It is my only human to the heart of my presence, one could say. Alive in a moment of nothing time. 

I've come to realize that little moments like these are the truth. The purest essence of conscious life and joy and love entwined together into whatever it means to experience being human. They are the state of presence we all strive for, whether or not even realizing it. Gratitude is the piece of us that holds us together when we feel like we’re falling apart. And the funny part about that, is that we only really experience it when we’ve learned discipline enough to place focus upon it. To look back at our exhaustion and our unpreparedness and say, "Thanks for the reminder."

Sometimes that's all we need.